The girl was real enough to cast a shadow.

That was the first impossible thing.

In a place where alternate endings flickered between solid and provisional, where the ground itself could not decide what century of mud it wanted to be, the child clinging to Delilah’s hand threw a clean, sharp shadow that pointed directly at living Zelda. Her green eyes were the exact shade the pup’s had been before the shared name began crowding them with colorless depth. Her face was Zelda’s face, scaled to three years old and stripped of every scar the war had not yet had time to teach her.

She had spoken five syllables of...